


No place like home

by SharpestRose



Category: Batman (Comics), Batman: The Animated Series
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-06-30
Updated: 2011-06-30
Packaged: 2017-10-20 21:48:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,039
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/217425
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SharpestRose/pseuds/SharpestRose
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Stephanie wakes up in the Animated universe.</p>
            </blockquote>





	No place like home

One:

The last thing she hears is the whine of the flatline on the heart monitor, and the last thing she thinks is "I guess your ears don't stop right away", and then everything gets heavy and dark and she feels so sad, and so lonely, and she never...

And then she sits up and screams, and Doctor Thompkins says "easy, easy" and tries to push her back down onto the bed, and that's when Steph realises that she doesn't hurt anymore, and that makes her start to shake so much her teeth clatter against her tongue and she starts coughing on the blood, and Doctor Thompkins turns to someone and says "help me hold her", and then Batman's there and looking at her like he's never seen her before, and that's when she starts to cry.

  
Two:

Steph can't look at Oracle, who isn't Oracle and is pacing by the window as if there's nothing weird about walking, as if it's just something ordinary that she does all the time, and Steph clears her throat and puts down the paper cup of hot chocolate someone gave her so long ago that it's cold now and says "you were Batgirl. In the real - I mean, back where I was." And it's only kind of a lie, and what else is she supposed to say?

She can hear Batman and Doctor Thompkins still talking in the other room, and mostly they're quiet but sometimes one of them raises their voice and then hushes up fast.

Batman found her lying outside the clinic, with a couple of bruises but nothing major, unconscious and dehydrated. Only there's something way more majorly wrong than just that stuff, because the whole world has gone different and Steph thinks that maybe this is hell.

"I thought you said that you worked with him," Oracle -- Steph can't stop thinking of her as that -- gives her a confused look. "You weren't Batgirl?"

"No, I was R..." she _was_. Batman _said so_. "I was Robin." She looks down at her hands. The marks from the manacles are still there, red and swollen and obscene. Steph covers them with the blanket she wears around her shoulders, but she knows Oracle saw.

"You were tortured." Oracle says it like the words will hurt less if they're fast and sharp, like pulling a bandaid.

Steph's too tired to cry anymore. "Yeah."

Oracle looks out the window and steadies herself on the sill. In a soft, bitter sort of voice she says "It figures that _that_ would be multiversal."

"What do you mean?

"Robin... the Robin here... he had something similar happen."

Steph doesn't want to ask. She can't ask. No. She won't.

Her mouth starts moving like she's in a nightmare, like she can't control it.

"Tim?" she whispers, and it turns out that she's not too tired to cry after all.

Oracle makes a noise like someone punched her, and nods.

Oh God. No. No.

"Is he... did he die, too?"

Oracle pulls in a breath. "No." Then, after a second, she says "Sometimes I wonder if it's really a blessing he didn't."

Steph's heart goes so light so fast that she laughs, giddy, and Oracle looks appalled. Steph tries to stop giggling so she can explain that she's not happy, it's just that it's been so long since she had any good news that now that she has some it's sort of hurting her a little, but she can't stop and she's laughing and laughing and laughing, because she's alive and Tim's alive and Oracle's walking and it's not hell it's a second chance and she'll do it right this time.

  
Three:

She might not've been the smartest of the Bats back home, but even Steph knows how to hack into a university database. After a few hours, she's got herself some tidy high-school records and a place in the Communications program on the same campus as Tim. Trust him to get into college a couple of years early, with all that free non-Robin time and all.

He's not like her Tim... the Tim back home, if home even exists anymore. He's a bit too much like her, in some ways. That lonely look that never quite goes away, no matter how many years it is since someone locked you in a cupboard without dinner.

He's not her Tim, but he's all she's got left, so she goes up to him after class one day and says "hi".

It takes them forever of dating before they start messing around, and she's not sure if that's her doing or his or both at once, and the first time they go all the way she can't stop shaking and he keeps choking on high-pitched little laughs like they hurt him and they're both crying and clinging on, and afterwards he tells her that he was a hero, in a different life, and she tells him that she was a hero, in a different world.

  
Four:

So the years go by and they get a crappy apartment with no heat and then a nice little house with creaky plumbing, and they have a kitten who grows up into a cat and then they have a baby and then they have another one, and if it wasn't for the old caesarian scar and a shake when Tim's skin presses against some parts of her she'd think that it was all a dream, like some bad trip she got overdosing on her mom's pills.

She found her mom, eventually. Or the lady who would've been, somewhere else. She's a preschool teacher and has never popped anything worse than aspirin, and there're two women out there somewhere who are, by DNA if nothing else, Steph's sisters.

One evening, while dinner cooks and Tim works late again, Steph wonders for just a second if maybe she's still lying in the clinic. If she listens hard enough, maybe she'll hear the sound of the heart monitor whining.

So instead of listening, she gathers Cassie onto her lap, and Cassie says "Mo-om, I'm too _big_ for goopy stuff, I'm nearly almost nine and a half!", and Steph strokes her daughter's hair and waits for Tim to come home.


End file.
